Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Former Defense Secretary Robert
Gates said he probably would have quit if he held the job when
the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration took effect
last year.

“I think I would have resigned” because “it is such a
mindless, stupid way to approach the nation’s defense budget,”
Gates said in an interview this week at the beginning of a tour
to promote his memoir, “Duty.”

Gates left office in June 2011, two months before passage
of the Budget Control Act that mandated sequestration. As early
as 2009, he had warned the military to prepare for leaner
budgets because “the spigot of defense spending that opened on
9/11 is closing.”

Gates tried to convince Congress that the Pentagon should
be spared from deeper cuts on the rationale that he had imposed
billions of dollars in savings from efficiency as well as
offering $78 billion in reductions in January 2011.

Instead, under the budget act the Pentagon faced $500
billion in reductions over 10 years starting in January 2013.
The cuts eventually took effect last March, reducing the fiscal
2013 budget by $37 billion -- $32 billion for basic defense and
$5 billion in war spending.

“It is so irrational, so damaging I’m not sure I could
have tolerated it,” Gates said. “When it happened” that
“might have been the moment” when he decided “I’m not going
to be a part of this.”

Exempting Personnel

“When you exempt personnel costs, which are a third of the
budget, and the fact that it takes a period of time to
renegotiate contracts -- big contracts -- that means the burden
of the cuts disproportionately falls on maintenance, training
and operations,” Gates said in the interview on Jan. 13.

For two consecutive years, President Barack Obama has
exempted military personnel costs, including $137.1 billion of
the Pentagon’s $526.6 base budget request for this year.

Sequestration has been eased through a congressional budget
deal last month that restored $22.3 billion for this fiscal year
and $9 billion in fiscal 2015 from about $52 billion in annual
reductions over that period.

Gates recounted in his memoir several budget fights with
the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and Obama. He
said they backtracked on previous agreements to moderate the
reduction in defense spending.

‘I Was Furious’

In April 2011, Gates said he was given only a day’s notice
before Obama announced $400 billion in new defense savings.

In his book, Gates recalled his efforts to resolve troubles
with the Pentagon’s costliest weapons program, the F-35 fighter
made by Lockheed Martin Corp. In February 2010 he fired the
program manager and removed $614 million from an award fee pool
that Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed was eligible to receive.

Asked this week if he would reduce the number of F-35s in
the face of rising costs for the plane and declining budgets,
Gates said, “The minute you start cutting quantity you start
driving the individual price” of a new aircraft “through the
roof.”

“So I might have stretched out the F-35” production,
“but the truth is, the services made an all-in bet on the F-35
for the future, so you’ve got to have the F-35,” he said.